Last Monday my Sony bookshelf stereo stopped working or rather, to be specific, the CD player in it stopped working. It wasn’t entirely a bad thing because I have hated that stereo since the first day I had it, mostly because the CD changer was excessively noisy and extremely slow. But I really hated having to spend money on a new one and also I was worried that I would end up getting stuck with another one that I wouldn’t like so I procrastinated all week before going out and looking for a new one.

Since I can’t get the local classical station in my house I have been listening to the Sonic Tap music channels that we get with DirecTV. There are two classical channels, “Light Classical” and “Symphonic”. I tried the latter and they seem to play mostly late 19th century and early 20th century music, generally not my favorite era so I’ve mostly been listening to “Light Classical”. It’s not what I think of as “light classical”. They play some very good music, in fact, just not very much of it – a lot of C.P.E. Bach, several Beethoven piano sonatas and J.S. Bach’s 1st Cello Suite, which is all very good but they played that one cello suite three times a day. Come on Sonic Tap! There are five more of them, you know! But I did make a discovery due to being stuck with this very limited music channel: I have to get Andras Schiff’s Beethoven Piano Sonatas. Have to!

Bored and curious, I switched to the New Age channel for a while on a couple of afternoons. You know, it’s really quite pleasant and soothing. That channel had the same problem as the classical channel though – they played the same half dozen artists over and over again all day long.

Well, anyway, Friday Number Two son and I went to the Best Buy in Owasso to look for a stereo. First we had lunch at Pizza Hut. They always have the lunch buffet on weekdays. We had just about decided that we had had enough when our really nice, friendly waitress brought us two platter-fulls of pizza which we did not ask for and did not want. But we took it with us in a to-go box.

Best Buy was disappointing. I expected to have more choices but there were only three and two of them were Sonys and I had already decided that I would not buy another Sony. So I bought the only other available system. It’s a Sharp with a five disc changer, AM-FM radio and a cassette player. It sounds really good and the changer is quicker and less noisy than the Sony. It’s not quite what I’d design if I could design the perfect stereo but it’ such and improvement over the last two that I can’t complain much.

So the past three days have been really good. Got to shopping and have lunch with one son and got a new stereo that I’m happy with, then Sunday my other son, daughter-in-law and grandson were here and we spent the day just hanging out. Now if I can just go one week without something breaking…